#Titanuary ‘Harrison Squared’ by Daryl Gregory

About the book…

From award winning author Daryl Gregory comes a thrilling and colorful Lovecraftian adventure of a teenage boy searching for his mother, and the macabre creatures he encounters.

Harrison Harrison—H2 to his mom—is a lonely teenager who’s been terrified of the water ever since he was a toddler in California, when a huge sea creature capsized their boat, and his father vanished. One of the “sensitives” who are attuned to the supernatural world, Harrison and his mother have just moved to the worst possible place for a boy like him: Dunnsmouth, a Lovecraftian town perched on rocks above the Atlantic, where strange things go on by night, monsters lurk under the waves, and creepy teachers run the local high school.

On Harrison’s first day at school, his mother, a marine biologist, disappears at sea. Harrison must attempt to solve the mystery of her accident, which puts him in conflict with a strange church, a knifewielding killer, and the Deep Ones, fish-human hybrids that live in the bay. It will take all his resources—and an unusual host of allies—to defeat the danger and find his mother.

Published by Titan in 2015, ‘Harrison Squared’ by Daryl Gregory is available in e-book and paperback formats from all good bookshops!

The tale of Harrison Squared, his search for his missing marine biologist mother, and his coming to turns with his ‘otherness’, takes the tale of the misfit adolescent, into, literally other dimensions.

A 3 hour tour on a boat with his parents, off the coast of Massachusetts as a toddler, resulted in the loss of half his right leg, his father going missing, and an overarching memory of something large, something with tentacles…

13 years later Harrison and his mum have returned to start a new research mission, placing bizarrey ordinaryily named buoys in the sea off the coast of the town of Dunnsmouth. Planning on capturing images of a giant squid, Harrison has very little to leave behind him and even less to look forward to.

The school his mother takes him to is one of the most bizarre institutions I have ever come across- un ceremoniously dumped on the less than thrilled admin staff, he is not given a timetable or any ideas of his lessons. He is merely told to follow fellow pupil Lydia, one of approximately 150 pupils calling a building which resembles a tomb more than a school, their place of incarceration Monday to Friday.

I lifted a hand in greeting. They stared at me. They were dressed in blacks and greys , not quite a uniform, but definitely a look, as if they all did their shopping at clinicaldepression.com. My tie-dyed shirt was like a loud laugh at a funeral.’

His first lesson, ‘Practical Skills’ has the teens knotting ropes, and making fishing nets.

Next he is taken to biology, which is actually cryptozoology , and where they use galvanism to try and bring an ex-frog back to life.

Me, I would have been completely thrilled, however Harrison has massive forebodings about this move up North.

His suspicions are confirmed when his mother puts out to sea with her remaining two buoys-Steve and Pete- and a local lobsterman, and does not come home. In spite of people offering a odd and insincere expression of his loss, before she is even. actually, lost, Harrison can feel that she is not actually dead.

Something is linking their family to this part of the coast. Notes left on their car telling them not to go into the water. and not to find the Albatross, all point towards something being terribly wrong in Dunnsmouth. More than just being an exceptionally weird place, there is an underlying darkness which hides very dark and non-human things…

Fighting his ‘other self’, a constant feeling of outsized rage. Harrison needs to use his clever tongue, sharp wit and skills of observation in order to find out just what has happened to his mother. And it might, just might, help him put his father’s last outing to bed, once and for all.

Filled with awesomely named characters such as Professor Freytag, Eston Montooth, and Coach Shug -no matter what situation you are in, P.E teachers are always of a type, this one is obsessed with swimming and will not accept lack of half a leg as an excuse to avoid swimming lessons-and fantastic new words to learn such as scrimshaw and baleen, Harrison Squared is a coming of age story unlike any others I have come across. Even the dinner ladies have an echo to ancient tales of Graeae, stirring pots of grey looking fish soup, and one pair of eye glasses between the three of them.

I laughed out loud quite a bit when reading it, found a fascinating mystery at the heart of it, and really enjoyed the journey that the teens were on. You have fantastic figures like Harrison’s Aunt Sel who never takes no for an answer. You have Harrison who has every reason to be angry at the course of his life and yet, recognising this, uses his intellect to challenge what quickly becomes obvious -he is in a cult-like town which believes in a religion, and deities, which pre-exist many species including humans…

I read and loved this , and was thrilled to find out that it is a prequel to We Are All Completely Fine’. Looking forward to reading that immensely as Harrison Squared was a proper breath of fresh air!

About the author…

Award-winning author of ‘Revelator’, ‘The Album Of Dr Moreau’, ‘Spoonbenders’, ‘We Are All Completely Fine’, and others. Some of his short fiction has been collected in ‘Unpossible And Other Stories’.

He’s won the World Fantasy Award, as well as the Shirley Jackson, Crawford, Asimov Readers, and Geffen awards, and his work has been short-listed for many other awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon awards . His books have been translated in over a dozen languages, and have been named to best-of-the-year lists from NPR Books, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Library Journal.

He is also the writer of Flatline an interactive fiction game from 3 Minute Games, and comics such as Planet of the Apes.

He’s a frequent teacher of writing and is a regular instructor at the Viable Paradise Writing Workshop

Links-http://darylgregory.com/

Twitter @darylwriterguy @TitanBooks